The Realization of Awakening is absolutely central to the Buddha's Teaching, and yet it has come to have so many different meanings, or none at all. What is our relationship to the idea of Enlightenment or Awakening? How does that affect our life and practice? Can we explore the views, assumptions and emotions surrounding it? And is a radical Awakening possible for us?

A free and honest life includes the very real awareness of death. If we can find the courage to deliberately contemplate death, to keep it in mind, this can open our life in a profound way to a nobility, urgency, purposefulness and beauty. The heart grows in compassion and moves toward the Deathless.

This talk begins to explore some of the challenges and difficulties we can sometimes encounter with regard to love. It also examines some possible beliefs and attitudes we may hold around love and particularly romantic love in our lives.

Mindfulness practice helps us see clearly how we’re creating suffering for ourselves with our insecurities, self-judgments, judgments of others or other conditioned reactions. But often seeing these isn’t enough to release their hold on us. In fact, sometimes it’s more frustrating to see them but still feel as stuck as ever. We’ll explore how to work with this predicament wisely so we 1) don’t have to be at the mercy of our lofty ideals of good practice can use some simple but effective methods for moving to a greater place of well-being.